Merciful Injustice Day 2: Ugly campaign targets Japanese-Canadians

Second World War gives rise to racism in a gritty Vancouver

Floyd Berrigan, accomplice of Robert Hughes in the Yoshi Uno killing, was already known to police when these photos were taken in 1940. He was 16 at the time.

Photograph by: ..
, Library and Archives Canada

Part 2 of a six-part series.

Vancouver in early 1942 was poised on the knife edge of modernity, a crisis moment of unprecedented opportunity and danger from which the future character of the city emerged.

Opportunity abounded for Robert Hughes. Unlike many rootless youths who washed up in Vancouver after the Depression, he came from an intact, working-class family that had left Saskatchewan for the beckoning West Coast.

After leaving school at 15, Hughes — Bob to his friends — landed an apprenticeship in wire rope and soon went to work building planes for Boeing near the Vancouver International Airport on Sea Island. He seemed destined to follow his British-born tradesman father into a respectable line of work.

Yet the city at this time also exemplified what has been called the noir era — a time of gritty glamour that was "a netherworld of gangsters, hustlers, junkies, femmes fatales, drifters, political fixers, private eyes, city officials on the take, and charismatic cult leaders as its stock characters," according to the authors of Vancouver Noir, a recently published book focusing on the gritty underside of the period.

This underworld threatened the city’s respectable residents, offering a very different path than they wanted for their children.

Well before the events of January 1942, Hughes was already signalling that he would choose the wrong path.

At age 18 he was caught stealing a clock, camera and flashlight, resulting in a three-month jail sentence. Before it was up he had enlisted in the Army, which found him to be both underage and underweight. At 6’ 1/2" and 142 pounds, he had a poor physique — though the Army still felt he could be turned into a soldier.

Once enlisted, on one arm he got a tattoo listing his Army registration number. On the other he commissioned a heart and scroll tattoo reading Bob & Jackie — a reference to his fiancée.

Despite having volunteered, his Army record shows Hughes was a reluctant soldier.

From the time he did basic training in Vernon, he frequently deserted for short periods and then began feigning illnesses that got him into the Army hospital.

He went absent without leave (AWOL) five times in 12 months, the last time for nine days before Christmas 1941. That time, upon returning to military custody on Dec. 28, he was sentenced to 6 days’ detention and forfeited $22.10 in pay. But he defied the order and left barracks to be with his friends.

December 1941 was also when, despite his marriage plans with Jackie Doidge, a pretty Kitsilano girl, Hughes met and soon was living with Rosella Gorovenko, a streetwise prostitute who talked like a movie gangster’s moll.

Gorovenko, aged 16 and a mother, had been doing business out of the fancy Hotel Georgia. For some reason — possibly she had contracted venereal disease — this was no longer an option and she had moved down-market to the Balmoral Hotel on Hastings.

Hughes moved into her room not long after. Soon Gorovenko slipped down another rung, relocating with Hughes to the third-rate Piccadilly Hotel at Seymour and Pender, also home base for one of the city’s most vicious criminal gangs — with which she allegedly had ties.

The Piccadilly was a classic noir setting — a dive where not one of the women’s toilets worked on the floors upstairs and owners never bothered sweeping the cigarette-butt-carpeted floor of the hotel’s dank, stinking beer parlour.

Nineteen city beer parlours were red-flagged as direct threats to the Canadian war effort because of prostitution and venereal disease.

It was such a problem by April 1942 that B.C. officials ordered walls to be built in beer parlours to separate the sexes and discourage prostitution — a development that had the effect of driving sex-trade workers into the street.

Sexually transmitted disease was so prevalent that a Vancouver child molester attempted to defend preying upon juvenile delinquent boys because he feared catching VD from women.

As manpower poured into the burgeoning city from the Interior, the Prairies and the East, attracted by the highest per capita income of any Canadian province, the resulting housing crisis had many residents living in appalling conditions.

Above one fashionable shop on Hastings, housing crusaders exposed a filthy warren of 50 sleeping rooms served by just two toilets.

Wealthy residents of Shaughnessy, many of whom kept their children safe from city vice by sending them to Vancouver Island boarding schools, fought a futile last-ditch battle to stop mansions from being cut up into boarding houses.

Historian Margaret Ormsby saw 1942 as a watershed year between formative and modern B.C. — the moment the province’s hinterland rose up and an old political order was shaken apart.

The streets around the Piccadilly were populated by the kind of down-and-out men who in the 1930s had risen up against North American materialism, and then were crushed by it.

Downtown Vancouver was a bare-knuckle boom town where taxi drivers doubled as bootleggers, homosexuals could expect to be charged with buggery, and stealing a suit from The Bay was worth two years’ hard labour.

As tens of thousands of workers were hired, streetcars ran full to capacity and jam-packed ferries crossed Burrard Inlet bringing workers to the shipyards.

Bosses pushed for, and in March 1942 received, the ability to run factories around the clock.

The city’s strategic location had long been recognized for its geopolitical significance. Now that was magnified.

Construction of the Alaska Highway — North America’s biggest project since the Panama Canal — was launched in northern B.C. in the spring of 1942 to create a supply line for American airbases.

Men and equipment streamed through Vancouver, which saw more industrial development than any other Canadian city.

Vancouver had long been a hotbed of radicalism and intrigue. Now the stakes grew.

A downtown Communist bookstore was shut down and its inventory seized under federal regulations. Stalin’s spies secretly got word back to Moscow revealing how American and White Russian agents plotted to dynamite a Soviet ship that was on the Vancouver waterfront.

On Jan. 14, 1942, rising anti-Japanese rhetoric finally turned into action when federal cabinet bowed to B.C. pressure by ruling that all male "enemy aliens" would have to leave the coast for work camps.

The news was so troubling that even decades later, some thought of this as the moment the clock stopped, not to be restarted for four years.

Canada’s Pacific coast at this moment remained badly shaken by the Japanese military’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

People were obsessed with two questions.

Could it happen here? And could B.C.’s 22,500 ethnic Japanese residents be trusted?

An official delegation of determined white men had gone to Ottawa to make the case for serious measures.

"The B.C. delegates spoke of the Japanese-Canadians in a way that the Nazis would have spoken of Jewish Germans," Maurice Pope, a top Canadian general, wrote many years later of the successful lobbying effort. "Their rage was a sight to see."

Another observer felt "the physical presence of evil" as the angry west coasters made their case.

Meanwhile, an intense debate was playing out on the pages of Vancouver newspapers.

According to one editorial, B.C. had dealt "very patiently" with ethnic Japanese for four decades since the time that Ottawa had allowed immigration from Japan for British Imperial strategic reasons, tolerating their presence and carrying "the Japanese burden" for all of Canada.

On Jan. 8, the Sun’s lead editorial, under the authority of legendary political columnist Bruce Hutchison, bore an unsettling headline: "Will Our Japanese Folk Take A Friendly Hint?" Removing themselves from the coast was a step the Japanese needed to take "for their own protection," the editorial stated.

Some in the mainstream press attacked the anti-Japanese campaign as "simple racial blindness as invidious as that which Hitler has invoked."

Now, with Japanese confectionary stores just like the Uno shop being attacked and robbed, Vancouver alderman Halford Wilson was campaigning to pull business licences of Japanese-run enterprises.

Among the city’s Japanese population, a parallel psychology was taking hold as they began to realize what was happening around them.

In a helpless panic, kept largely in the dark, subject to wild rumours, the Japanese-language newspapers now shut down, they relied on their Canadian-born children to explain what was going on.

B.C.’s harshest critics got much of what they wanted in the Jan. 14 federal cabinet decision bowing to B.C. pressure by ruling that all male "enemy aliens" would have to leave the coast for work camps.

It was a crushing blow for many families — even though the worst was still to come. In another six weeks, the wholesale internment order would be issued, affecting all ethnic Japanese in British Columbia. But the precedent of January’s step crushed overnight any hope among the Japanese that they would be treated fairly.

The Uno men were all Canadians, but now many of their immigrant neighbours in the Kawamuko enclave were about to lose their breadwinners and see their families torn apart.

Young ethnic Japanese men who thought of themselves as thoroughly Canadian were pleading to be allowed to join the Canadian Army — as had been allowed in the U.S. — but were coldly refused.

While most Vancouver residents were preoccupied with war, Gorovenko and Hughes hatched a plan to enrich themselves. They would get a gun, form a gang, and rob some confectionary stores in Fairview very close to where Hughes’ family lived. It was later said they wanted money to rent a car.

By Friday, Jan. 16 they had everything required. It was time to execute the plan.

Meanwhile, Yoshi Uno went through the developing war situation with his family after dinner in the living room behind the corner store at 4th and Alberta, as his sister Yaeko read the evening Sun beside him. Yoshi knew that one way or another, his family faced trouble ahead.

It was 8:20 p.m. when the store bell rang and their mother ran out front. They heard her cry out "They came back!" in Japanese.

"My mother recognized them, so she knew something was wrong," eldest daughter Haruko (Uno) Funamoto recalled in a recent interview with The Vancouver Sun. "It seems that a couple of weeks before this happened, I guess these three fellows came in to case the joint."

A moment later Yoshi was shot twice by the tall white man peering through the curtain into the living room. Despite his wounds, he got up and raced out front, followed by his athletic brother Yuki.

Yoshi got to Hughes first. Hughes’ two male accomplices fled the store — Yuki tripped one, who lost a shoe — while the two men struggled. Yoshi tried to push the long-barrelled Colt revolver toward the ceiling. Weakened by the gunshots and standing only 5’5", he was no match for Hughes.

What happened in the next few seconds to cause a third bullet to be discharged from the gun is at the heart of an enduring mystery.

Conflicting eyewitness accounts by two Uno family members portray two very different scenes. Either Yoshi was shot during the close struggle, perhaps unintentionally, or Hughes deliberately fired at him from across the room as he was about to flee the store.

Haruko Funamoto saw only part of the incident. She heard her mother scream and ran to the doorway into the store.

"My brother fell forward because he was hit beside the eye," she recalled. "He hit the floor and the blood spurted out."

To Yuki, it looked like Hughes fought off Uno and made for the door before turning around. His mother thought differently — it seemed to her that the gun went off during the struggle.

The bullet struck Uno in the head, entering his skull and passing horizontally across his brain.

He fell to the floor, the counter scale crashing down with him.

"I looked to see it and then I ran back into the family room to get the telephone to phone the police," said Haruko Funamoto. "They came so fast!"

Oiyo Uno chased the robbers out the door. They got away, but she returned with a prize piece of evidence — the broken shoe that one of Hughes’ accomplices lost after being tripped up by Yuki in a panicked dash to the back lane.

Haruko took over the phone from her sister. "She was crying and screaming and jumping up and down and I had to tell her to quiet down," she recalled.

Within several minutes, police flooded into the store and the ambulance Haruko had called was arriving.

By 8:30, as Vancouver tuned in to the popular radio show When Crime Strikes, Yoshi, accompanied by Haruko, was bound for Vancouver General Hospital. There, the emergency doctor noted his pupils were widely dilated and fixed, not reacting to light.

With blood flowing from his ears and nose, his death was inevitable. It came shortly after 9 p.m.

A hunt for killers was now on.

Over at Kitsilano Beach, the men responsible for Yoshi’s death were about to make a series of bad decisions.

"It was terrible that evening," recalls Haruko Funamoto, now 94. "I can still remember like it was yesterday."

Seventy-one years later, a re-examination of the evidence has resulted in a surprising conclusion.

B.C.’s troubled $182-million social welfare computer system only does one-third of what was promised, suffers from lax security and is hindered by poor data and duplicate files, according to a new report by the province’s auditor general.